Welcome to Alcoa!

Ever have one of those weeks that you dread coming in on Monday? Well, this week I could not have been more excited to get to work. You see, my first official hire began on Monday.

I arrived at ~5:30 AM to set everything up and met him for his orientation (three hours later!) We got his photo taken, discussed building access, parking and all the mundane minutia of organizational life at Alcoa.

I'm pleased to share that Week 1 was, in my view, a smashing success. We got off to a great start and he is already contributing tremendous value, even as he traverses a steep learning curve. But this is technically the start of Chapter Two to our story.

Here's Chapter One:

I carefully wrote a job description that emphasized the profile of the type of person I needed for the role. I listed no degree requirement and only the minimum qualifications to credibly do the job.

I adapted this to create a structured, behaviorally-based interview guide complete with competency categories, follow-up prompts and examples of good / bad answers, along with a corresponding scoring rubric (strong answer, average answer, weak answer) and room for notes, then attached this to every interview meeting request.

I formed an interviewing team comprised of my HR business partners, our project manager for the Phase II implementation and several key contributors with whom the position would be working closely.

We paired off for each interview so that we had the benefit of multiple perspectives for later calibration. Each candidate was interview by two sets of interviewers (i.e. four people) and asked the same questions in the same order to ensure comparability across candidates.

We held a debrief meeting afterwards to share our impressions across each category (question), then the overall scores for each candidate were tallied up (using a simple equation: 0 points for a weak answer, 1 for average, 2 for strong), along with a subscore for the five key skills that would form the core of the role.

The strongest candidates were invited back to meet with my boss. We made a decision the next day.

Once we got through the background check / negotiation / offer stage, I reached out to express how thrilled we were that he accepted, offered to meet up and answer any questions and shared a list of priority items that we needed to focus on.

Then, I purchased a nice gift basket and sent it to his home with a personal greeting. I also bought a ton of jelly beans and a candy jar to give people a little incentive to come over and say hello (see picture at the top).

I typed up a detailed schedule for his first day and set out learning objectives for each of the first two weeks. I prepared several documents summarizing the state of our critical projects and packaged these up so he could review on his schedule. I brought him around the office to make introductions to important collaborators. I also booked time for us to meet each day to (again) answer questions and provide a crash course on Alcoa's history, business units, key leaders, projects and internal partners to the role.

We agreed on initial performance goals and I invited him to begin thinking about what skills he wants to strengthen so we can work together to get him exposure to skills he wants to bolster that will help him advance his career in the direction he desires.

Finally, I shared a four page presentation outlining my personal style, communication preferences, expectations and management philosophy.

New hire success is the result of rigorous selection standards and intense preparation. It's a lot more work up front, but take it from me... when you find the right person, it's worth it!